“Aster Archer, I want to fall in love,”
And so started another day of classes, with Quincy Tate telling his best friend Aster Archer exactly what he wanted from life.
“That’s nice, Quincy.” Aster Archer, a bodacious blond in her early twenties with beauty barely bearable to the average man, was quite used to the day by day babblings of her childhood friend. It was a special bond they had- Quincy would exclaim with great pride and surety what he felt he needed right at that very moment and Aster Archer would shoot him down back into the confines of reality. This near perfect unity had been in existence since they were seven.
“Aster Archer, don’t deny me this! I really mean it, I want to be in love and do that weird forehead touching thing people in love do! You know, they show it in movies all the time and stuff.” Quincy’s pleading was useless. Aster, who wasn’t even looking at Quincy while they were ‘conversing’, flipped through her college textbooks, turning each page over sloppily like she was doing a rush job on cooking some pancakes. Much like pancakes, Aster did not care for the majority of her textbooks, no matter how much they cost her each semester.
“Let me break it down for you, Quincy. Do you have a trust fund?”
“No, but-”
“Then you’re not getting married anytime soon. Besides, remember what happened the last time you fell in love? Here, help me with this question. I can’t find the answer in this book.” Aster Archer was, of course, referring to Lucky Avery, a girl (or rather, THE girl) Quincy had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with at first sight. She had felt the same way and in the process they had exchanged a single eye with each other, leaving both young adults heterochromnic from that point forward. They lost interest in each other three days later.
“You always do better on these problems than me anyway. I hate math.” Quincy enjoyed pouting almost as much as sulking, which was second only to him loving being outside, which was second to his love of long-handled spoons, which was, once again, only second to him treating Aster as his own personal diary. “Hey, aren’t girls supposed to suck at math? I remember hearing that from like TV or something.”
“You should learn a dirty lie when you hear one, Quincy Tate. Don’t believe what you hear on TV without researching the darn subject to death. If you’re not careful, you’ll get tangled in the world’s grotesquely unkempt hair of deceit.”
“Is that like a web of lies?”
“Trying to be creative here, Quincy.”
“Make me a flower and I’ll forgive you.”
“You’re such a girl.” The rare specimen known as Aster Archer’s smile found a way to ooze out of her dead pan face, her tiny mouth forming an expression of love she kept around in a box marked and reserved almost specifically for her times out with Quincy. She finally looked at him after carefully bringing out her one prized possession, and once Quincy saw it he smirked in retaliation, proud of himself for bringing out that fresh expression. “After class when no one’s around, alright? And if you finish your homework, we’ll see about stepping into Raincoat territory tonight.”
“Hell yeah, I love stepping into Wakeman’s territory! The Horrorscope says Lady Barkhurst’s been doing weird séance-y crap, we’re going to see some great stuff tonight.” As a hobby the duo went ghost hunting, but their real passion was doing it at the same time as a group of other students who called themselves ‘The Raincoats’, simply to annoy them with a nonchalant attitude of the entire process of exorcising ghosts from the places they haunted. People who took anything too seriously, especially themselves, tended to never have fun. Aster and Quincy decided long ago that life was a game, and what could you do but play the game with a bit of class and panache? The glass to others may have been half empty, but they were going to make that half a glass last as long as they could.
No one could ever explain how or why they were connected to someone, and Quincy could never quite explain why he felt so connected to Aster. Her parents used to refer to them as their own gaggle of geese, two birds that only needed each other to soar through the empty skies. In fact, sometimes it felt to Quincy he didn’t exist without her, his best friend.
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